TCS Daily : September 2007 Archives

As over 150 heads of state and government gather at UN headquarters in New York to discuss climate change, former Vice President Al Gore, the most prominent proponent of the theory of the human-induced, catastrophic global warming, continues to...
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According to a CNN report, the recent controversy over the four-letter, "Taser this: F*** Bush" editorial in the Colorado State University's student newspaper "sparked a national free speech debate". Indeed, the Rocky Mountain Collegian's editor-in-chief, David Mc
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What made Hugo Chavez possible? How does a country let a man whose credentials are those of a coup leader who tried to topple a legitimate government become the unbridled ruler of the nation? What kind of people applaud a...
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Two hundred years ago William Wilberforce led the successful struggle to end England's lucrative slave trade. In America, 55 years later it took a bloody civil war and the deep humanity of Abraham Lincoln to end the "peculiar institution."...
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Editor's note: TCS contributor Andrew Och recently sat down with Daniel Gross to discuss the American economy for a forthcoming primetime documentary edition of the PBS series Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg. Gross is the author of "Pop: Why...
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The pendulum swings back and forth about what ails the regulation of drug development. Thirty years ago, the concerns were primarily about "drug lag" - indolent reviews and approvals by the FDA that put Americans at disadvantage to consumers...
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Some of the nation's top business and policy leaders assembled in Washington recently for the Commerce Department's "Summit on American Competitiveness." Among the speakers were the CEOs of Intel, FedEx, and GM, along with other illustrious participants. Improving
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"One of the most systematic errors in human perception is what psychologists call hindsight bias -- the feeling, after an event happens, that we knew all along it was going to happen. Across a wide spectrum of issues, from politics...
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One of the marvels of the American way of life is its foundation in common sense. American principles are such a universal part of the human experience that it doesn't take much in the way of communication to remind us...
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Transaction costs. Externalities. Pareto superiority. Sound daunting? Imagine a young woman, just months out of university and having spent the last four years wandering, wide-eyed, through the worlds of Dostoevsky, Steinbeck, Voltaire, and Gide. Suddenly she finds
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This month, the AMA launches a three-year, multi-million dollar campaign to spur action to cover America's uninsured. The AMA will unveil new television and print ads and discuss other campaign activities. The initial phases of the Voice For The...
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The U.S. Justice Department recently fined British Airways (BA) and Korean Air $300 million apiece after they acknowledged price fixing on international flights. With rising fuel prices cutting into their profit margins, the airlines admitted to collusion with riv
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In the middle of a roundabout from the airport to the town of Juba, the capital of Southern Sudan, there is a sign that reads "Armed Conflict Is a Health Risk." The people of Sudan should know. Their land...
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The phenomenon best known as 'Web 2.0' has been hailed as the savior of the Internet. After the dot-com crash of the late 1990s, the world hung its head (and guarded its coffers) in the wake of manifold e-disappointments....
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There is rising support, led by Presidential candidate Senator Joe Biden, for a "soft partition" of Iraq into what he calls a "federal Iraq." As this idea is moving to the front burner of political discourse, it is important...
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When I say "amyloid," of course, almost everyone thinks of beta-amyloid protein (also called "amyloid beta"), which accumulates as the waxy "senile plaques" that cluster around the brain cells of people with Alzheimer's disease. --Aubrey de Grey, Ending Aging: The.
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This week the European Court of First Instance ruled on Microsoft's appeal of the 778 million Euro antitrust fines (over a billion U.S. dollars) which the European Commission has imposed on Microsoft. To get a sense of the anti-competitive...
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At Tuesday's Federal Open Market Committee meeting, two overarching questions should be put on the table regarding the US economic outlook. Might the credit crunch presently characterizing financial markets prove to be more enduring than previous credit crunches? A
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Editor's note: Few issues in American political life have generated so intense a debate as immigration. The US Congress this year failed - twice - to pass an immigration reform bill. With no consensus on a political path forward,...
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In an Executive Order titled Establishing the President's Board on Safeguarding American's Civil Liberties released on August 27, 2004, the following statement regarding government obligation to ensure privacy to Americans is made: "The United States Government ha
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In an economy with $47 trillion in financial assets, how important is the $2 trillion private equity (PE) sector to economic growth in the United States? Does the tax structure for the sector matter, with respect to its potential...
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"There is an equivalence between a tariff and a quota as these are drawn on the blackboard...They are not, however, equivalent in practice. A tariff and a quota generally involve different institutional frameworks...With the quota, the distribution of sales...
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Historians will one day wonder how it was that the world's leading democracies came to rely on Gen. Pervez Musharraf to lead the cause against Islamic fundamentalism in a region central to that struggle.The idea behind Musharraf's support was that...
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There has been a void in the Republican presidential race. The GOP candidates have spoken about immigration, taxes, social issues, and the war in Iraq. Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and John McCain have also spoken frequently about Ronald Reagan...
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Editor's Note: TCS Publisher Andrew Walworth recently sat down with Kenneth Fisher to discuss the American economy for a forthcoming primetime documentary edition of the PBS series Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg. Fisher is best known for his prestigious "Portfolio.
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On Monday, September 10, 2007, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker delivered their long-awaited testimonies to a joint hearing of the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees. General Petraeus made the headlines when he announced that the
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Since 2001, each September we remember. Today, we first think of the frontline fighters in Iraq, Americans, Iraqis, and other members of the Coalition in combat, first against Saudi-incited, Wahhabi terrorism - miscalled a "Sunni insurgency."But none of us...
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For at least the last twenty years the cultural and political elites of the United States have championed the cause of multiculturalism by claiming that diversity was something that made all of us better. Little effort was ever made...
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The Annual Energy Forum recently hosted by Montana State University outlined the challenges of keeping carbon out of the atmosphere while supplying the energy people demand at prices they're willing to pay. I came away convinced that geoengineering, i.e., the...
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One would think only a crazy couple would declare war on environmentalists by presenting them on film as snobs, hypocrites and enemies of the poor. Luckily for those of us who think one-sided debates are boring, Phelim McAleer and Ann...
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Renaissance era Vienna was a moral cesspool. Brothels were everywhere, marriage was disappearing and the resultant army of unfathered children created a crime wave. The Duke of Vienna decided to go on a 'listening tour' of the city. He donned...
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In a column describing the appreciation of his Brooklyn (NY) brownstone, Portfolio Magazine economics writer John Cassidy said to his wife, "Thank God for the Chinese government. It made us a million dollars." To Cassidy's way of thinking, "generous lenders"...
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Congressional Democrats are trying to expand government health insurance to children who don't need public assistance, while their party's presidential hopefuls are concocting even grander schemes to achieve "universal coverage." "That's socialized medicine!" cry
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After decades of research and a plethora of seemingly infinite numbers of dead-end leads, scientists have finally discovered the cause of the biggest Public Health scourge of our time - Obesity. And what is that cause? Well, it is...
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The market for treatments of malaria - which kills over one million people a year -- is of almost no commercial value: Although patients seek over 300 million treatments a year, and perhaps as many suffer without treatment, few...
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I suspect that the widespread panic over potential mortgage defaults is due less to the magnitude of the underlying problem than to other factors. One factor is that August was a slow news month. Another factor is that many...
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When I was in the fifth grade, I decided to learn how to play the trumpet. Soon after, but long before I understood the concepts of economics, I realized that I did not possess an advantage - absolute or...
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Seung Hui Cho gave plenty of warning signs of his violent suicidal explosion, long before he killed 32 fellow students and faculty and then himself at Virginia Polytechnic Institute on April 17. Indeed, the day he was supposed to...
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